Romeo & Juliet, Neolithic-Style

Happy Valentine's Day!

Love is grand. It is the time of year for us to dwell on those significant others in our life and to shell out large sums of money on flowers, chocolate, and expensive shiny things. My kids made some great little cut-outs of hearts with stickers on them for us at daycare yesterday, but I don't think my lovely wife would care for such a gift from me, so I'm getting something a little more expensive to express my undying love for her. Of course, my intentions are partly selfish. I'm expecting chocolate. But I don't expect it to stop there – hubba hubba.

I invite you to read about the history of Valentine's Day, starting with Saint Valentine and how, prior to being put to death by the Roman emperor Claudius, he sent the first Valentine's letter to his beloved, the daughter of his jailor!

http://www.history.com/minisites/valentine/viewPage?pageId=882

Valentine's Day has been celebrated since the late 1300's:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine's_Day

Well, as you are wondering about the best way to express your love, roaming through the mall to find the right little gift, or perusing the Hallmark isle, think about a more eternal sort of love expression: dying together and being buried in a loving pose, arms intertwined, staring into each other's eyes, so you can be found up to 6,000 years later in such a condition:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/02/07/prehistoric.love.ap/index.html

Another article: http://www.physorg.com/news90589132.html

Yes, my little lovebirds, how could you possibly top that? It isn't known yet how this young couple died. Disease? Catastrophe? Apparently it wasn't uncommon in those Neolithic times in that region that, if the man died, his wife would be put to death and buried with him. Lovely! But there is no evidence that this is what happened in this case. For today, at least, we will assume a more pleasant ending, eh? DNA testing will determine if they were related, and further analysis of the bones may reveal cause of death. Buried along with them were some arrowheads and a small knife.

Where else would you expect such a romantic burial but Italy? Along with France, Italy is often considered one of the most romantic of nations. The dead couple were found near Mantua, Italy, which just happens to be only 25 miles south of Verona, setting for Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet"!

The archaeologists who are excavating the site will remove the pair in one, large, undisturbed form, preserving them in this unique burial position so that they may remain models of undying love.

Sigh.

My Managers May Be Neanderthals

I've always suspected that certain managers at my evil global biotech company are part-Neanderthal.

Okay, I'm stereotyping. That's a bad thing. I'm working on the cliché assumption that Neanderthals were sort of brutish and lacked good reasoning skills. Picture, if you will, a club-wielding, exceedingly hairy man with a prominent brow ridge, short and slightly bent over, and dressed in bedraggled animal skins, who chooses a mate based on who can be dragged away easiest by their hair. I wouldn't want to be racist (or, I guess, the best term is *species-ist*) about Neanderthals. For all anyone knows, they were tender, loving, hippie types. Just about the only thing known about their culture, as far as I can tell, is that they lived in tight-knit social groups and resisted changing their technology. That's apparently why they died out – they didn't adapt to changes in the European climate and didn't cross social groups.

Now imagine if those Neanderthal types were leading a company. Resistant to new ideas from outside their tight-knit group. Not thinking things through in a long-term, rational manner. Dying out because they didn't adapt quickly enough. Yeah, I stick to my original suspicion.

A recent news story suggests that there may, indeed, be real-life Neanderthals working alongside me:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory?id=2796508

The finding of a skull in a cave in Romania suggests that Cro-Magnon _Homo sapiens_ (early modern humans) may have interbred with Neanderthals (_Homo erectus_), creating a hybrid of the two. HERE is the nitty-gritty research paper. The skull exhibits aspects found on the skulls of both species and dates back 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, to a time when the two species were found together in the same geographic area.

Though their cultures inhabited the same regions, there isn't much evidence that Cro-Magnon and Neanderthals actually mixed culturally or even with warfare, but who knows? Maybe some desperate Cro-Magnon gal drank a little too much fermented ox milk (or whatever the heck they drank), saw a Neanderthal guy from across the field, and thought, "You know, I always wanted to get shagged by Fred Flintstone. Yaba daba doo!"

This isn't a new idea. Back in 1999, the skeleton of a 4-year old boy was found in Portugal, his bones dating back about 24,500 years. HERE is a link to that story. His bone structure suggested he had some Neanderthal ancestry. The interesting thing with that finding is that Neanderthals were thought to have died out by then, so the boy wasn't a "love child" of fermented ox milk, but rather the offspring of generations of hybrids. If so, there's a good chance that the lineage continued onward, perhaps into you and me!

So are some of my managers actually part-Neanderthal, acting on their primitive impulses? Well, let's just say the Cro-Magnon in me isn't interested in mixing.